When we are in conflict with someone, or are adversely affected by someone’s actions, even without personal interaction, or see others being adversely affected, our habit is often to pull back, close our hearts, create judgments about the other person, and all around make them less than human.

For me, for example, where I get completely lost, is whenever I interpret anyone’s behavior to mean that they don’t care. My entire life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been profoundly affected by anything that registers in me as unkindness or lack of care. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to recognize the nature of the effect. It’s a shock to my system. Despite all I know about what human beings are sadly capable of inflicting on each other, I am still, somehow, shocked whenever I see any instance of it. My soul still refuses to believe, as it always has, that cruelty and unkindness truly happen.

It is not uncommon for me to receive several such shocks in the course a normal day. Almost anything can affect it. Sometimes it’s just seeing a tattoo, and thinking about the pain a person put their body through in order to have the tattoo. I could feel this shock when seeing someone throw something out through the window of a car into public space. Or when hearing someone say “I don’t care about how she feels!” I shudder when hearing someone make a joke at the expense of someone else or a group. I cringe in some movies when an audience laughs at a person designed to be made fun of because of their weight, and just thinking about what life is like for that person that would lead them to accept an acting role in which they know they will be made fun of, and why others find it funny. I feel this shock when I see, in many of the places I work with, how bosses talk about or interact with their employees. At times I feel this shock more than anywhere when I see how many parents respond to their children.

With this degree of sensitivity, I keep away from the news. I don’t trust my own capacity to recover from the shocks fast enough if I am exposed to the details of what is going on in the world.

With all of that, I nonetheless continue to have some fountain of faith in human beings that, although brittle, is endlessly renewable. When I first heard from Marshall Rosenberg, the man who gave us Nonviolent Communication, the simple and radical idea that every act of violence was a tragic expression of an unmet need, and, more generally, that everything that anyone ever does is an attempt to meet a human need that I myself would have, these ideas gave form and substance to my faith in a way that has sustained me and supported me in finding more courage, power, hope and even pleasure in life than anything I ever had before.

Becoming the Other Person

Just about anyone who’s ever taught Nonviolent Communication sooner or later engages in role-plays. Often enough, the people we are asked to be are someone whose actions would easily be seen as harmful, damaging to others, or even cruel. Over the years, I have found myself “being” a man who molested a girl; another man who took all his wife’s money, destroyed the school they built together, and disappeared; a woman who tortured her daughter; a soldier who just came back from Iraq and is livid about those who protest the war; and George Bush (several times over). Each time I become this person, I have no idea initially how I would find any authenticity in expressing the truth of the person I am being. In each of these instances, I have to bridge the chasm between my visceral shock reaction at whatever aspects of this person’s actions I find lacking in care and kindness, and my faith that whatever they do has, must have, always has, some human emotional logic that I will be able to make human sense of, because, ultimately, it relates to some human needs no different than my own. I have attempted to describe this process, which is sometimes wrenchingly painful, sometimes sublime, as solving an emotional equation within my own body.

Each and every time I have done this, my own understanding of what it means to be human has grown. I have some palpable, tangible grasp on what could happen to someone that would lead to acting in ways that previously were completely opaque and mysterious to me. My heart feels bigger, more resilient, more capable. My love expands, my reach, my ability to support others, to understand them in more and more circumstances.

I have also noticed that when I am in such a role-play, the moment I find my authentic access to the humanity of the person I am being is a moment of true healing for the person who asked me to do the role-play. I wrote about one such time. I called it “Finding Unexpected Humanity.” I wish I could write and share with everyone in the world all of these experiences. They are some of the holiest moments I can remember. Some of the biggest pain that any of us has when we have been harmed by another is the very loss of being able to see that person’s humanity. When we are unable to see someone’s humanity, our own shrinks, we are diminished, made smaller. We need to protect and enclose ourselves, we trust humanity as a whole less, we take fewer risks, are less willing to open up to life. When I am able to show someone a possible way of making sense of another person’s apparently inhuman acts, the relief, the restoration of possibility, are almost indescribable. Something melts that may have been encrusted for decades. For a moment, or forever, there is an opening back into the fullness of life. When another person becomes human again, our own resilience increases, and we suffer less.

Humanizing Others and Empathy

One of the early discoveries I made while learning Nonviolent Communication was that whenever someone is heard, they find more willingness to hear another. This is one of the reasons why I find the practice of empathy to be so transformative and why conflict resolution practices of all kinds converge on the irreducible role of people being heard. It’s also, undoubtedly, the main reason why a certain conviction has taken root within the community of Nonviolent Communication which I have been trying to overcome: I regularly hear people say, as if it’s a “rule”, that we can’t offer empathy before we receive it. I want to overcome this habit, because in situations of conflict someone is always going to be the one to listen first to the other if the conflict is to be resolved rather than suppressed, avoided, or escalated. I want all of us who believe in nonviolence, who learn Nonviolent Communication because we want to be agents of change in the world, to find access to our hearts sufficiently to be able to respond empathically without waiting to be heard first. It’s clearly the case that in order to respond empathically in any kind of authentic way, to truly be interested in hearing what the other person has to say, we need to be able to see that person’s humanity. My own experience with myself and others leads me to believe that we can do that directly, and that in the process we diminish our own suffering. Humanizing the other person is something that benefits me even before it ever translates into anything relational.

Some people can reach a level of cognitive mastery of empathy that is so high that it becomes possible to use words of empathy even without having an open heart. I know I have done it at times, and I have seen it any number of times in practice settings. Even though such apparent empathy is clearly designed to defuse the conflict, the mechanical nature of it has been known to infuriate others and escalate the conflict rather than defuse it.

In order to be in empathic dialogue, I must be able to imagine being the other person. It’s a deep discipline for me. It requires me to overcome the righteous pleasure of writing off the other person; of making myself ever so slightly superior, more human, more caring; of keeping my world safe and protected by eschewing others. I come face to face with the undeniable reality that this person who did this act is human just as much as me. I plunge into that other world, that other and different experience that gave rise to that which is mysterious to me. Through that, I find them, I find their heart, even if they have lost it. I find their care, however deeply buried it is, even if they actively protest and deny it. I reach for their heart even when it’s well hidden and protected, so well that they themselves don’t see it. I am reminded, as often, of Longfellow’s quote: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” I wish I were joined by many more in this most magnificent and excruciating task. I wish I succeeded more often, with or without the company of others to do it with.

5 Responses to “Who Benefits From Empathy?”

i can’t help thinking that a vital key to easing ourselves into acceping the enemy’s humanity is, indeed, learning about their painful histories including the deep fear and shame that likely accompany those origins.

fear and shame can push pain deep into the darkest corners of our subconscious, as we go through life denying them all.

There is a difference between having empathy for someone and tolerating bad treatment. As long as my capacity for compassion doesn’t devolve into making excuses for unacceptable behavior or allowing my boundaries to be violated, I agree with you. We can understand what motivates someone without necessarily condoning that behavior. Seeing life as another sees it can reveal the ways in which from their perspective, their actions make sense. But that doesn’t make their behavior OK automatically; doesn’t make hurtful acts any less hurtful.

Worse yet are those who claim authority in areas they themselves have not mastered, without having the humility or self-awareness to admit they are not skilled at what they preach – an unfortunately common phenomenon. It’s OK if someone is not perfect – it is not OK if he presents himself as though he thinks he is. Most people live as though they are the victims of their moods and circumstances; they don’t have to.

My earliest memories embody the cruelty and torture and murder of the animals I so loved at the hands of children, and the helplessness I felt that I was too small to intercede. My heart broke then, and it continues to break at the endless array of slaughter, poaching, and torture of our kindred partners on earth. I have found no resolution to this, and can’t seem to find consolation in the belief in a god or karma to sort out the good from the bad in the afterlife. I don’t even find it ethical to tolerate the human at my side who is able to kill the elephant, rhino, wild horse, shark, forest, etc. That is my quandary, even though I respect your quest.